The Book of Basketball (13 page)

(Seriously, I’m not making this up.)

(Wait, you don’t believe me? Here’s what John Havlicek wrote in
Hondo:
“Wilt’s greatest idiosyncrasy was not fouling out. He had never fouled out of a high school, college or professional game and that was the one record he was determined to protect. When he got that fourth foul, his game would change. I don’t know how many potential victories he may have cheated his team out of by not really playing after he got into foul trouble.”)
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Translation: Wilt cared about statistics more than winning. If they kept track of blocks in the sixties, the Dipper would have become obsessed with those numbers (especially as they compared to Russell), dumped the never-fouled-out streak and inadvertently turned into a dominant defensive player, almost by accident, possibly someone who won five or six titles instead of two. But there was no statistical rush from defense. So Wilt settled on raking up offensive numbers, spiking blocked shots like volleyballs and pursuing his inane streak of never fouling out. It wasn’t until the ’66–’67 season that Wilt realized his teams were better off if he concentrated on rebounding, passing and defense. Here’s how he described that
epiphany in his autobiography,
Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door
(now that’s a title!):
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I was 30 years old when the ’66–’67 season began, and I was maturing as a man, and learning that it was essential to keep my teammates happy if I wanted my team to win.

[As far as epiphanies go, that ranks somewhere between Pete Rose admitting that he had a gambling problem and John Holmes glancing down at his fourteen-inch schlong and realizing he needed to try porn. Better late than never, I guess.]

I not only began passing off more and scoring less, I also made a point of singling my teammates out for praise—publicly and privately.

[Wow! What a sacrifice! What a guy! So wait … if you’re trying to win basketball games, it’s a good idea to be unselfish and to act like a good teammate instead of hogging the ball and blaming everyone else when you lose? Are we sure? Do we have confirmation on this?]

I realize now that this is the kind of thing that helped make O. J. Simpson’s teams at USC and Bill Walton’s teams at UCLA so successful. The same is true of Joe Namath and the Jets.

[Um … Wilt? The same was true for Bill Russell—you know, number 6 on the Celtics, the team that knocked you out of the playoffs every spring?]

O.J. and Bill and Joe always praise their teammates. They remember the name of every key guy who throws a key block or makes a good assist or a good defensive play, and they tell the player—and the press—all about it. That can’t help but make the player try even harder the next time, instead of maybe letting down, subconsciously, because he’s tired of being ignored and hearing how great you are all the time.
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[I don’t know, Wilt—this sounds too crazy. I thought basketball was an individual sport. They don’t keep stats for praising your teammates. I think you’re wrong.]

I was just learning this lesson in 1966, and it was reflected in my statistics.

[“Granted, I threw away the first seven years of my career and everyone hated playing with me, but you have to hand it to me—I
did
learn the lesson.”]

Instead of me averaging 40 points a game, we had a great scoring balance. Hal Greer averaged 22.1, Chet averaged 19.3, and Billy averaged 18.5. Luke Jackson and Wali Jones also averaged in double figures. That’s the kind of balance Boston always had.

[The Celtics won the title every year for Wilt’s first seven years in the league. Only in 1967 did it occur to him that his teams should start emulating what worked for the best teams? Yeesh. Nobody ever said Wilt was a brain surgeon.]
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After he embraced “unselfishness” and won his first title, in classic Wilt fashion, he lost interest in winning and became obsessed with his assist numbers. Suddenly Wilt was passing up easy shots to set up teammates, checking the scorer’s table multiple times per game, complaining if he felt like he hadn’t been credited for a specific assist, lambasting teammates for blowing his passes and taking an inordinate amount of delight in leading the league in ’68 (a record he bragged about more than any other).
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As
with anything else he did, Wilt failed to strike the right balance and settled into a bad habit of being
too
unselfish, taking only two shots in the second half of Game 7 against Boston while his teammates floundered around him. The heavily favored ’68 Sixers blew a 3–1 lead and choked in Game 7 at home, but as Wilt pointed out in his book, “Hal hit only eight of 25 shots. Wali hit eight of 22. Matty hit two of ten, Chet hit eight of 22. Those four guys took most of our shots and hit less than a third of them. But I got the blame.”

So much for the lessons of Walton, Namath and Simpson. What did we learn about Russell, Chamberlain, and statistics? Well, Wilt’s teams revolved around his offense and Russell’s teams revolved around his defense. Wilt coexisted with his teammates; Russell made his teammates better. Wilt had to make a concerted effort to play unselfishly and act like a decent teammate; Russell’s very existence was predicated on unselfishness and team play. In the end, Russell’s teams won championships and Wilt’s teams lost them.

Russell 11, Chamberlain 2. Those are the only two numbers that matter.
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MYTH NO. 4:
WILT WAS A GREAT GUY

Was Wilt a great guy to approach in the airport? Absolutely. Was he great to interview for a magazine or a talk show? You betcha. Did the people who knew him have great stories about him? No question. Was he generous with his money? Of course. If you were a stewardess, was this someone you would have wanted to blow under an airplane blanket? Apparently, yes. For such a good guy, it’s bizarre that Wilt sucked so much as a teammate. He just didn’t grasp the concept. For the first six years of his career, he hogged the ball, became infatuated with scoring records and demanded to be treated differently than his teammates. When things finally fell apart on the ’65 Warriors, legendary
L.A. Times
columnist Jim Murray wrote, “[Wilt] can do one thing well—score. He turns his own team into a congress of butlers whose principal function is to get him the
ball under a basket. Their skills atrophy, their desires wane. Crack players like Willie Naulls get on the Warriors and they start dropping notes out of the window or in bottles which they cast adrift. They contain one word: ‘help.’”
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Even when Wilt played more unselfishly and copied Russell’s game, he couldn’t maintain it for more than a year and became smitten with assists. He openly clashed with every coach except two—Frank McGuire (who let him shoot as much as he wanted, leading to the 100-point game) and Alex Hannum (and only because Hannum challenged him to a fight to get him to listen).
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He blamed teammates and coaches after losses, feuded with teammates who could have helped him (most famously, Elgin during the ’69 season) and demeaned opposing players to the press to make himself look better. He had a nasty habit of distracting his own team at the worst possible times—like the
’66
Eastern Finals against Boston, when
Sports Illustrated
released a controversial Chamberlain feature before Game 5 in which he ripped coach Dolph Schayes and destroyed the morale of his team.
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Some believe that Wilt achieved too much too soon, that he never understood the concept of teamwork because he’d been the center of attention (literally) since he was in high school. In his Chamberlain-Russell book
The Rivalry
, John Taylor writes that Auerbach believed Warriors owner Eddie Gottlieb “spoiled Wilt something fierce. A lot of times, Wilt didn’t even travel with his teammates. He was out of control. Auerbach doubted that he himself would have been able to coach Wilt…. Wilt spent that year with the Globetrotters, tasted the big money and stardom, and he began thinking that he was more important than his coach or teammates. Goty, afraid of losing the big draw, let him get away with it. Chamberlain had become convinced that people came to games in order to see him and that, therefore, the point of every game was to give him an opportunity to play the star. There was a certain box office logic to this thinking, but it made Chamberlain uncoachable, in Auerbach’s view, and
as long as he was uncoachable, any team he played on would never become a real winner.”
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If you’re wondering how Wilt was regarded around the league, here’s the ultimate story: When San Fran shopped him in ’65, the Lakers were intrigued enough that owner Bob Short asked his players to vote on whether or not he should purchase Chamberlain’s contract. The results of the vote? Nine to two
… against.

Nine to two against!

How could anyone still think this was the greatest basketball player ever? In the absolute prime of his career, a playoff contender that had lost consecutive Finals and didn’t have an answer for Russell had the chance to acquire Wilt for nothing
… and the players voted against it!
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Would they have voted against a Russell trade? Seriously, would they have voted against a Russell trade in a million years?

(Note: if this were the O.J. trial, that last paragraph would be the equivalent of O.J. trying on the bloody glove.)

MYTH NO. 5:
A COUPLE PLAYS HERE AND THERE
AND WILT COULD HAVE WON JUST AS MANY
TITLES AS RUSSELL

Nearly every NBA champ had a pivotal playoff moment where they needed a big play and got it, but that doesn’t stop Wilt’s defenders from ignoring this reality and making excuses for every one of his near-misses: the ’60 Eastern Finals (Wilt injured his right hand throwing a punch in Game 4); Game 7 of the ’62 Eastern Finals (a controversial goaltending
call proved the difference); Game 7 of the ’65 Eastern Finals (Russell nearly wore goat horns
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before Havlicek saved him); Game 1 of the ’68 Eastern Finals (right after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, when Sixers coach Alex Hannum never had his team vote on whether or not they should play, allegedly killing the morale of the team, even though they won Games 2, 3, and 4); Game 7 in ’68 (when Wilt’s supporting cast went cold); Game 7 of the ’69 Finals (when Wilt “injured” his knee in crunch time); and Game 7 of the ’70 Finals (when Willis Reed’s reappearance ignited the MSG crowd and Walt Frazier destroyed West). That’s all fine. Just know that Wilt’s teams sucked in the clutch
because Wilt sucked in the clutch.
The fear of losing overwhelmed him in big games. Terrified of getting fouled because of his dreadful free throw shooting, he played hot potato or settled for his patented fall-away (the one that landed him fifteen feet from the basket and away from rebounds), and he didn’t want to foul anyone if he had four or five fouls because, you know, it would have interfered with his laughable no-fouling-out streak. That made him nearly useless in close games, like a more tortured version of Shaq from 2002 to 2007, only if Shaq was afraid to foul anyone and had a persecution complex.
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Here’s what NBA great Rick Barry wrote about Wilt in his autobiography,
Confessions of a Basketball Gypsy
, which has the worst cover in the history of sports books:
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I’ll say what most players feel, which is that Wilt
is
a loser…. He is terrible in big games. He knows he is going to lose and be blamed for the loss, so he dreads it, and you can see it in his eyes; and anyone who has ever played with him will agree with me, regardless of whether they would admit it publicly. When it comes down to the closing minutes of a tough game, an important game, he doesn’t want the ball, he doesn’t want any part of the pressure. It is at these times that greatness is determined, and Wilt doesn’t have it. There is no way you can compare him to a pro like a Bill Russell or a Jerry West … these are clutch competitors.

Holy smokes! Some harsh words from a guy who wore a wig for an entire NBA season four years later. But let’s examine those Game 7’s in ’68, ’69, and ’70 again. In the first one, Wilt took two shots after halftime and steadfastly kept passing to his ice-cold teammates, then blamed them afterward because they couldn’t make a shot. In the second one, Wilt banged his knee and asked out of the game with five minutes to play, enraging coach Butch van Breda Kolff (who refused to put him back in, even if it meant costing the Lakers the title) and Russell (who uncharacteristically slammed Wilt that summer, launching a feud that lasted nearly twenty-five years). In the third one, Willis famously limped out and drained those first two jumpers, only it never occurred to Chamberlain, “Wait, I have a one-legged guy guarding me, maybe I should destroy him offensively!”
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He just didn’t get it. Wilt never understood how to win; if anything, losing fit his personality better. Here’s how Bill Bradley described Wilt in
Life on the Run:

Wilt played the game as if he had to prove his worth to someone who had never seen basketball. He pointed to his statistical achievements as specific measurements of his ability, and they were; but to someone who knows basketball they are, if not irrelevant, certainly nonessential. The point of the game is not how well the individual does but whether the team wins. That is the beautiful heart of the game, the blending of personalities, the mutual sacrifices for group success…. I have the impression that Wilt might have been more secure with losing. In defeat, after carefully covering himself with allusions to
his
accomplishments, he could be magnanimous…. Wilt’s emphasis on individual accomplishments failed to gain him public affection and made him the favorite to win the game. And, simultaneously, it assured him of losing.
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